In a hospital environment patients may periodically be injected with medical drugs. In many cases such operations are performed manually; the recording and monitoring of medical drug administration to a patient is also usually performed manually, and therefore some operations might not be properly recorded.
For example, the stress conditions in operating rooms, ICU or emergency areas, and the consequent low priority of record keeping, may cause that a patient receives a medication but the information is not stored in the patient's medical record, or at least not stored with the desirable accuracy and detail.
On the other hand, monitoring the administration of drugs and storing the information for further reference are critical for a correct medical treatment.
An automatic medication delivery device is known for example from U.S. Pat. No. 5,651,775, which is able to monitor the drug delivery and record relevant events. This system involves placing the syringe in a cradle for the automatic delivery of the medication to the patient, and reading data from a special label associated with the syringe.
The placement of the syringe in a cradle limits the maneuverability of caregivers, and forces them to change the way they usually work; inserting the syringe in the device may also be time consuming. Furthermore, the cradle and the reading system don't allow using standard syringes and labels.
US2011/0112474 addresses the problem of manual record keeping, and discloses a medication delivery apparatus for use with a syringe. The syringe is provided with an information source that provides detectable information indicative of the medication in the syringe and/or the volume of its contents. The device has an identification sensor to detect the data on the information source, and a fluid delivery sensor.
However, according to this document sensors are arranged to read the area of the tip of the syringe, and therefore the information source must be placed in this area: this has several disadvantages, for example due to the small space available and the impossibility of using standard syringes and labels. Moreover, the fluid delivery sensor has a high cost and is prone to errors at different flow speeds.
It would be desirable to provide a device capable of monitoring a manually operated syringe while allowing the caregiver a significant degree of maneuverability, and generally reducing the drawbacks of the prior art.